Candace Brito, 27, and Vanesa Zavala, 25, appeared at a preliminary hearing as Pham’s family member wore buttons with the victim’s likeness. Both women had pleaded not guilty to murder, according to KTLA. A judge will decide if there is enough evidence to send two women to trial on charges they stomped and kicked a 23-year-old woman to death in a fight outside a popular California nightclub.

Patricia Navarro, a veteran Santa Ana homicide detective, said a witness reported seeing Vanesa Tapia Zavala, 25, join in a fight that started with a verbal altercation. Zavala and Candace Marie Brito, 27, both office workers from Santa Ana, have pleaded not guilty to murder charges, according to the OC Register.

Officer Gerardo Corona said three people from Pham’s group, including her ex-boyfriend, gave witness statements at the scene. All three said Pham was standing in line when one of the women bumped into her and then “two to three females immediately began attacking Ms. Pham,” Corona said, according to CBS News.

Kim Pham could have died as a result of being punched, kicked or hitting her head on the sidewalk during the violent Jan. 18 altercation, Dr. Etoi Davenport said, according to the L.A. Times, which also reported that Davenport testified that “There were blows to the head, more than one, and as a result of that she passed away.”

Late last month, police said they were having trouble finding some witnesses who were with Pham that night and blamed the slow investigation in part on a suspicion of government figures that still abides in some pockets of the Vietnamese immigrant community here, according to CBS News.

What do you expect when the SAPD’s temp Police Chief and the City Council denied this was a hate crime – before their investigation was even done? Why would the Vietnamese community trust these people?

21 Responses

“What do you expect when the SAPD’s temp Police Chief and the City Council denied this was a hate crime – before their investigation was even done? Why would the Vietnamese community trust these people?”

I really don’t know what’s worse: 1) The beating death of Pham. 2) The “balls-less” response by the city government (I want to call it caviler) or 3) The lack of outrage from her friends and the community at large.

We hear time and time again about the thriving Downtown Arts community and the “vibrant” downtown. But, here sits an incident AS SERIOUS AS IT GETS and we hear……..NOTHING.

Maybe it is all about money, power, rent and elections after all and that pretend place called the artist village.

Well, I think we can we can reasonably assume they were angry, who else would kick another person to death? As for being drunks, I am not sure it matters.

If your point is: the accused were fueled by booze, served by an under-regulated, alcohol intensive plan for downtown in order to capture revenue, with little or NO regard for the outcome……..I’d say yeah.

Where is Martinez, Benavides and their propagandist Adam “Paul Joseph Goebbels” Elmehark on this. A THOUSAND words about the whitewashing of BAD Grafitti, but a young women is kicked to death and we hear…………..NOTHING.

Your buddy at the VOC quotes an artist:
Wiping away tears, Rojas said: “It boggles my mind, the lack of communication.” Rojas said to Jakosky. “You don’t see the value in us. And that’s a slap in the face.”
The “community” is so inflamed over a mural, it brings tears to the activists face, but ask Michele Martinez about Kim Pham and she chuckles.

From the OCR article:
“Another witness who took the stand, Santa Ana Police Det. Patricia Navarro, said she worked undercover in the days after Zavala and Brito were arrested, pretending to be an inmate at a jail in Santa Ana and secretly recording a discussion with Zavala.”
From the LAT:
“A Santa Ana police detective testified Monday that she posed as an inmate and went undercover into the jail cell of a defendant in a high-profile beating case after the woman refused to talk with detectives and asked for an attorney.”http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-nightclub-suspect-secretly-recorded-20140210,0,128741.story#ixzz2szYtM66f

I am wondering why you left this essential information out from your article?
With this, the case is pretty much over.

They are presenting enough evidence to have the court bring the defendants to trial.

The best is saved for the trial, like what was the alcohol level of the descendant. And I guess defendant’s blood test if any, would be too late for an accurate measurement. (Unless drugs were involved too)

What ever will happen in this trial ain’t gone be justice but the political exhibitionism.

This is a simply one of these situations when the Murphy’s law prevails!

The victim a defendants were in the wrong place at wrong time (the space and the time relativity), on the collision curse and nothing could prevent that.

It happens all the time, that is the beauty of the life and death.

Unfortunately the tragical ending of this event happened only in our universe and not in the infinite parallel universes.

If you would posses a time machine, as I do, you could replay and revisit the same event in the other “space & time” frame and will see that in the 11th parallel universe noting happened what so ever and in the 21 parallel universe things got much worse where the Santa Ana was burned to the ground by the Vietnamese.

If I could, I would lend you my remote control so you could click and surf the parallel universes to see that we are actually living in the most pathetic universe of them all.